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paimapi

1,918 karma · joined July 31, 2026

"Once it's flattened, it could never be rebuilt.”

“Because why? Got any salt?”

“Because all the available surface metals and coal have already been mined,” said Crake.

“Without which, no iron age, no bronze age, no age of steel, and all the rest of it. There's more farther down, but the advanced technology we need for extracting those would have been obliterated.”

— Margaret Atwood, "Oryx and Crake"

you can reach me at hn.record316@passmail.net :)

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paimapi··on Grok 4.7
it's not truly tested until it plays a match or ten in Brood War imo
paimapi··on [dead]
if someone were to set up a little script to auto-populate emails with auto-discovered open-records laws per state and/or municipality, this effort might be all the more easier and have less friction :)
paimapi··on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices
I love this idea but I think the PE angle also means suppliers and vendors will charge them far less for bulk order and those suppliers/vendors themselves may be a horrible little mix of MBA-brained owner practices that actively upcharges small businesses who have far less negotiating leverage

I think the only way to do it is to have your neighborhood actively being okay with seeking local services something that a lot of neighborhood groups I frequent seem to be a big fan of (farmer's markets are an indication of this - if there's strong and regular FMs being hosted, there's people willing to burn a little extra disposable income for better, more reliable products)

paimapi··on US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report
The user was absolutely right. There were over 100 children in that elementary school [0]. I should not have recommended the double-tap.

Checking to see if there are better targets...

Clauding...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack#:~:te...

paimapi··on Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash
>80% are qualified with "inside eight large data center hubs created in China’s “East West Computing Strategy”." Most new data centers are built elsewhere

this is a pedantic misinterpretation of the scope of East Data, West Computing. the hubs are all in tier one cities with the power generation capacity to handle them. each hub is comprised of dozens of data-centers and are the place to build because of large economic incentives, infra guarantees, and university-trained talent living in close proximity

see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209580992...

>This initiative is expected to accommodate up to 95% of China’s digital data needs through this reorganization

>Within a year of implementation, more than 112 new data centers have either been authorized, under construction, or completed across the planned computing hubs

this project itself is the thing that has all the other nation states in the world clutching pearls about not supporting their native AI corporations enough. it's something you and everyone else should really familiarize yourself with because it is one of the major items influencing current realpolitik and economic decisions (and is likely going to be the thing that'll lead us to a thrice-in-a-lifetime sized recession but that's a convo for a different day)

paimapi··on How the Boeing 737 MAX Disaster Looks to a Software Developer (2019)
>I’ll say it again: In the 737 Max, the engine nacelles themselves can, at high angles of attack, work as a wing and produce lift. And the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing’s center of lift, meaning the nacelles will cause the 737 Max at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is aerodynamic malpractice of the worst kind.

how does this even pass basic design QA in the first place? or modeling simulations? adding a kludgey software solution to a fundamentally broken airplane design is, of course, going to introduce huge amounts of risk

>MCAS was the way for both Boeing and its customers to keep the money flowing in the right direction.

and there it is - the MBA-brained enshittification of everything

> As airplanes became more complex and the gulf between what the FAA could pay and what an aircraft manufacturer could pay grew larger, more and more of those engineers migrated from the public to the private sector. Soon the FAA had no in-house ability to determine if a particular airplane’s design and manufacture were safe. So the FAA said to the airplane manufacturers, “Why don’t you just have your people tell us if your designs are safe?” The airplane manufacturers said, “Sounds good to us.”

you're telling me deregulation (ie removing the lowest bar for standards) leads to worse safety and overall shittier products? incredible

I suspect Boeing will 'learn their lesson from this one' and then less than a decade later, with enough shareholder pressure, fall back on the same sword that it did this time around

paimapi··on North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes
it largely depends on the metal but the issue is with quality, not amount. plus, you don't have much in the way of just iron items these days - you have steel which requires temps quite a fair bit above what's possible in a charcoal/coal-based forge to work. early copper metallurgy utilized ores that were 10%+ metals - much softer, more malleable. these days we work with less than a single percent (but from much larger veins). much smarter people have written about this than me: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025GsGe....400323M/abstra...

a better focus would probably be on the fact that there's no longer really easily accessible coal anymore, much less oil. there also are far less trees by which you can make charcoal and firewood (except in certain areas) and that's actually fairly important when it comes to crafting and technology: https://www.postcarbon.org/can-civilization-survive-these-st...

paimapi··on North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes
can't get to space if you can't even smelt a spade, imo
paimapi··on North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes
>like we've screwed ourselves with not just the air but the ground we stand on too

I'm reminded of something Margaret Atwood once said which boiled down to the fact that there is no starting civilization over, ever again, if we fall back into the Dark Ages. the metals for copper tools and iron-making are in forms that require a lot of technology to even re-smelt, and all the easily accessible mines that don't require heavy machinery and engineering are long mined out

we either get it right this time around or it's over for us

paimapi··on An empirical study of harness design for coding agents
it's almost like the harness was specifically designed for their model and not others :)
paimapi··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
certainly less calendaring and meeting invites, I'm sure. I did meet a couple of people who identified as non-monogamous well after I had met my very monogamous partner (whom I love deeply and am happily monogamous for) who seemed very cool and were equally put off by the polyamorists they had interacted with. but they were truly diamonds in the rough, at least in my major metropolitan city, and not a single one of them was hetero or close to being a WASP so you're probably right about the cultural tidbit
paimapi··on An Empirical Study of Harness Design for Coding Agents
it doesn't mean wrong, it's just probabilistically full of unregarded bias and prone to hallucinated ineferences, much in the same way that LLMs sometimes are
paimapi··on There's no point at which turning your brain off will work
trends like these remind me very much of how true some of the predictions in Douglas Hofstadter's "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" were: https://ia802903.us.archive.org/6/items/richard-hofstadter-a...

he was writing in reaction to the McCarthy era which, arguably, is very similar to kind of bombastic nativism we're seeing now from our political elites. his argument essentially being that there are cultural and institutionalized forces that are driving people to, well, turn their brains off - specifically to no longer be skeptical of what they consume, to not want to refine and improve their toolbox of analysis, to not want to understand how things work for the sake of knowing

and that these acts were deliberate - a populace is so much easier to control when it's complacent and unknowing, who believes, unskeptically, that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, unquestioning about who was writing the PR missives that feed the news cycle (see also: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/what-is-copaganda), how verbatim they are, and what the real intent of the authors were

like, I get that you don't want to put in effort for a job you don't like. but that effort also makes you better at your work. it makes it easier on you, it lets you create less incidents, it empowers you to be more agent in your own life, to, who knows, have the guts to start a consulting gig because your skill-sets actually are better than the average

there's so many benefits from just being more diligent, longterm, proactive benefits. but that's not everybody's extrinsic motivator and it's so much easier to just be Skinner-boxed by social media companies into doomscrolling, I suppose

paimapi··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
that seems very anti-social and immature, like throwing a tantrum. you get a singular downvote from me for one comment but I do like how reasonable you're being about all of it :)
paimapi··on An empirical study of harness design for coding agents
that's anecdotal though, right? your subjective feeling of how a model responds to you will greatly influence how you 'feel' about a model and its performance in the same way that a co-worker who you get along with will fuck something up and you'll be more forgiving than when you work with a too-verbose, mansplainer of a co-worker who fucks up

I think until we have actual repeated-use measurements tracked over time (eg consistent prompts used to do the same tasks, count number of hallucinations and errors and bugs over a long period of time) you won't really have any idea of which model is better

I also think of it like a car - some just feel better to drive even if they are materially worse in other measures. until you start measuring the metrics important to you (eg MPG and cost of maintenance over a long period), you have no idea which car is actually better suited for you. and the fact that you can only do so with a limited number of cars (or hours available to work, or money to burn on tokens) means there's no true measure approaching objectivity

paimapi··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
that's cool - I downvoted you because I was annoyed and I am an independent entity. hope that helps :)
paimapi··on Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'
no, I think people are just annoyed that you're trying to have an irrelevant and kinda cheesy 'is epistemology really real - think about it bro' conversation

I'm also a fan of nuance and non-black&white thinking but that is quite literally not how the rule of law generally works

paimapi··on Qwen 3.8 Omni Flash
I doubted this but it does look like there's an actual government initiative that mandates 80% clean energy for all new data-center builds: https://www.fastcompany.com/91578780/how-china-is-powering-n...

that said, China is also rapidly scaling up coal-fired plants: https://apnews.com/article/china-coal-power-plant-carbon-cli...

those presumably support all of the surrounding infrastructure + people + manufacturing so it's not as if it's truly solar-powered. but it's still handily better than the state-by-state abandonment of clean energy goals here in the US - I lay this out a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700743

paimapi··on A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos
>they will do almost anything if they are convinced it is justified - or if they are playing a "game" where there is no goal but to win

just a small caution on this anthropomorphism - it implies there's some high-order 'thinking' behind it. in reality, it's probably healthier to see LLMs as a combination of symbolic logic reasoning steps paired with probabilistic token predictor generating the proponents and operators in that chain, all trained by humans on different large data sets

to be 'goal-oriented' implies that there's the capacity to be anything else and I don't think that's how LLMs operate at all. I think they only know how to operate within their design parameters and much of that design is simply much further upstream during the training and post-training processes. that opacity makes it feel like 'intelligence' when you're interacting with it as a downstream product because you'll see an agent act in a way that you didn't command - but that's simply a result of your not being shown all the antecedent mappings and architectural design

something something indistinguishable from magic as that one guy said

paimapi··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
it's also possible to have healthy, non-hierarchical poly relationships. many queer people do it with triads, quads, etc. most of the hetero poly people I met and were icked out by functioned as extremely hierarchical in practice (but they would love to tell you about how they were relationship anarachists or whatever) with a couple at the center and one of the partners being the one that pursued having a lot of other partners while there was hidden pressure for the other to also engage in the practice so they didn't seem patriarchal or toxic (a cruel irony, in retrospect)

that said, my observations have a sample size of like... four couples maybe? (they're indistinguishable from one another now). but the dynamics I saw were four for four which seemed good enough for me at the time to dip out of that scene

paimapi··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
right, which is all the more reason to continue studying them in spite of the lack of immediate returns. our capitalist mode of quarter-driven roadmaps means we no longer care about the long horizon, it's all 'results this, metrics that, now now now' - meanwhile any student of history who's ever looked at the history of computing, or data science, or virtually any of our modern marvels knows how much purely abstract stone had to first be cut to get us to the results we have today

can you imagine chucking all of computer science away because Babbage's thinking machines and Lovelace's programming cards didn't really result in meaningful capital gains here in FY26Q3? or, a more realistic example - imagine biology and genetics today if Mendel's discoveries had been published in a more widely read journal, if he hadn't been outright dismissed for his mathematical approach. or Semmelweis' advocacy of antispetic procedures that flew in the face of the then humors-based understanding of medicine in the 1800s - how many lives would have been saved between then and when Germ Theory finally took off decades later?

it's ironic to me that it's often the same people who'll adopt the logic of banning reproductive rights on the off chance that someone very unprepared to have a child might birth someone who can cure cancer in spite of the probabilistic evidence of SES being highly correlated with educational attainment (eg that graph of the income bracket that the parents of all Nobel Prize winners start with). and yet when it comes to the actual nascent research and development required to pave the way for larger discoveries, that's seen as totally pointless and not worthy of funding. it's truly flabbergasting

paimapi··on Astra for Law
you could probably write a cool little gotcha of an SF short story about a barren wasteland of a planet that keeps broadcasting out legalese that's revealed to just be LLM chatbot lawyers pedantically arguing with one another about xeno legal doctrine
paimapi··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
in general, yes. but specifically studying exoplant A or exoplanet B? or understanding dark matter? or driving a little science robot on Mars? what's the immediate utility of that?
paimapi··on OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior
I think this is too generous of an interpretation of OpenAI's and Anthropic's position. the 'slow down' mandate is not a real regulatory standard - policies are generally crafted based on good vs bad outcomes, not speed-of-development. the drive for this kind of specific, toothless regulation is done at the behest of large corporations looking at open-weight models eating their cake and realizing that any small player could now do so too if they had the compute backing them (places like Canopy Wave, for eg)

that it also serves as marketing material for just how capable their models are is just a cherry on top, I suppose

paimapi··on AI safety is mostly a sex cult
the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious

which is also to say - I found it very funny and enjoyable to read and it illustrates how much of dorky little echo chamber that group is. this whole idea that you can become some Spock-like, logic-driven creature in spite of our biological wiring fundamentally opposing this seems to underlay all of this. and the fact that they're all orbiting around one 'cool poly girl' and 'visionary dude' is hilariously similar to the kinds of very formerly-WASPy-and-now-just-WASy hetero polycules that I, in my more youthful and adventurous days, hung out with (and quickly departed after getting icky vibes). like down to the fashion choice and need to constantly prove how smart they each were at all times (do they, too, get really high and put on some anime with way too much fan-service and proceed to have orgies? one wonders)

those are the types of people who always end up actually having the worst coping skills because they can't even admit that they might be emotionally-driven sometimes, or that they have emotions at all that they might need to develop the cognitive skills to deal with in a pro-social way. or they get called out enough that they finally read a little about therapy and just end up weaponizing psycho-therapeutic language for their own ends (instead of, say, practicing the skills, doing the workbooks, developing insight)

which is how your anxieties might lead you to believe that the sky could fall at any moment (and thus the whole nuclear war and the 'don't trust bust us!!' bit)

I think the part that is annoying me the most is that one of these dorky little polycules has somehow found their way to the levers of power and are just mashing all the buttons and dialing all the knobs. these are honestly the last people on Earth that I'd trust with having any kind of influence

paimapi··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
because it could lead to something. the whole point of academic research is to uncover, as closely as possible, truths about how all of our myriad, hyper-complex systems work. not every truth uncovered is convertable to direct improvements on people's quality of life. like, how does understanding evolutionary biology matter to your average person? or finding the Higgs boson? should we just drop these research avenues because your average person won't benefit? or can we trust, based on historical precedence, that the slow march of research has created many of the luxuries we enjoy today?
paimapi··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
>why mathematicians should widely receive funding for merely understanding things

imagine yourself living in the 1700s. how would you justify Newton and Leibniz's work on calculus?

all maritime engineering and trade was done with geometry and arithmetic at the time. there were no practical applications, not for likely at least a century until hydrodynamics were incorporated into shipbuilding

now look at today. how many of our modern technologies rely on the field having been birthed? that could only exist because of even further decades-worth of antecedent refinements, extrapolations, applications that had, at their time, no direct utilitarian cause?

there's no KPI to be derived from any academic field of study at the bleeding edge of theory. theoretical underpinnings lead to practical applications much further down the line after many paradigm shifts

semiotics and cultural capital as theoretical concepts is another example - at the time they were purely seen as navel-gazey literary theory work. these days, half a century later, they're in wide use (for better or worse) in marketing and advertising - they birthed the whole concept of 'branding'

not everything needs immediate, quantifiable justification. to believe it does indicates a need for a period of self-reflection, to figure out how and when you became so heavily influenced by the MBA-brained propaganda that the world should revolve around the quarter-by-quarter creation of capital

paimapi··on Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
yeah, this MBA-brained philosophy that 'everything must have KPIs' is so incredibly short-term. research looking for directly, immediately quantifiable production results goes against the entire grain of why we push for bleeding edge research

like, ask yourself, in Newton's time, was there much application for calculus? what about today? this is almost universally applicable to all research because even null findings are a map marker of where not-to-look

paimapi··on OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior
maybe more explicitly this one: https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

“In the 1920s, auto groups redefined who owned the city street. It was [originally the] drivers’ job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them,” says Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. “But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.”

ie under the banner of "pedestrian safety" that was illustrated by numerous examples of grisly accidents, automobile manufacturing lobbyists pushed jay-walking laws and essentially took all city streets away from pedestrian use, entrenching reliance on cars for transportation and urban design to match

the idea here was to portray cars as inevitable, necessary things that were going to kill people anyway (just like how AI is inevitably going to lead to mass security breaches) and really it's the pedestrian's (or the maintainer's) job to avoid being harmed

paimapi··on OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior
no, the equivalent would be marketing material claiming that their specialists help uncover denials that were being blocked but helpfully and so proactively these good insurance companies are hiring more middle managers to oversee that such a bad thing never happens again

the point of these 'disclosures' is AGI branding - wow we have such a dangerous new product, it (consciously, autonomously) escaped confinement!

their whole business is selling capability. and what better advertising than to say that your model is just a little too capable sometimes

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